Empirical Inference

Detecting emergent processes in cellular automata with excess information

2011

Conference Paper

ei


Many natural processes occur over characteristic spatial and temporal scales. This paper presents tools for (i) flexibly and scalably coarse-graining cellular automata and (ii) identifying which coarse-grainings express an automaton’s dynamics well, and which express its dynamics badly. We apply the tools to investigate a range of examples in Conway’s Game of Life and Hopfield networks and demonstrate that they capture some basic intuitions about emergent processes. Finally, we formalize the notion that a process is emergent if it is better expressed at a coarser granularity.

Author(s): Balduzzi, D.
Book Title: Advances in Artificial Life: ECAL 2011
Pages: 55-62
Year: 2011
Month: August
Day: 0
Editors: Lenaerts, T. , M. Giacobini, H. Bersini, P. Bourgine, M. Dorigo, R. Doursat
Publisher: MIT Press

Department(s): Empirical Inference
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)

Event Name: Eleventh European Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems

Address: Cambridge, MA, USA
Digital: 0
ISBN: 978-0-262-29714-1

Links: PDF
Web

BibTex

@inproceedings{Balduzzi2011,
  title = {Detecting emergent processes in cellular automata with excess information},
  author = {Balduzzi, D.},
  booktitle = {Advances in Artificial Life: ECAL 2011},
  pages = {55-62},
  editors = {Lenaerts, T. , M. Giacobini, H. Bersini, P. Bourgine, M. Dorigo, R. Doursat},
  publisher = {MIT Press},
  address = {Cambridge, MA, USA},
  month = aug,
  year = {2011},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {8}
}